This chapter examines Nietzsche's early writings, arguing that his later views regarding the perspectival yet objective character of human knowledge are present in an embryonic form in his early thought. Nietzsche struggles to articulate, through a critical engagement with Kant and Schopenhauer, a possible reconciliation of self and world, central to which is his rejection of both Kant's constitutive conception of knowledge and his transformation of the idea of the thing-in-itself into a sphere of reality which, although irreducible to human minds, is nonetheless knowable by us in principle. What is notable about Nietzsche's early writings is that although he rejects the idea of the thing-in-itself, which in its Kantian guise is unknowable to beings with our cognitive constitution and in its Schopenhauerian guise only accessible independently of the forms of our knowledge, he does not reject metaphysics. Although most commentators to date have interpreted Nietzsche's early metaphysics as a reference to the thing-in-itself which he would later abandon, I shall argue that his early metaphysical struggles are, to a large extent, continuous with his later attempts to reconcile human knowledge with the nature of reality.

These conclusions, however, can only be reached after a considerable degree of interpretive engagement with the texts. In the early writings Nietzsche investigates a number of possible responses to the issue of the relationship between self and world and it is often difficult to decipher precisely which response, if any, he intended to endorse. Moreover, it is often difficult to distinguish between the different responses themselves as he does not always indicate with any degree of transparency that he has altered his view or that he is occupying a new perspective.